Live from the America’s Cup: Director of production Leon Sefton on pushing the limits of sailing broadcasts
Louis Vuitton 37th America’s Cup: Emirates Team New Zealand take on Ineos Britannia (Credit: Ricardo Pinto/America’s Cup)
Serving as director of production for TV coverage of an America’s Cup is no small feat as you need to be able to not only juggle the production crew and operations at a land-based production control facility but also keep on top of video and audio signals that are being sent in from yachts and chase boats that are upwards of three kilometres away.
Leon Sefton is the director of production for this year’s race as well as the previous 36th edition in New Zealand and other races like the Volvo Ocean Race and Olympic sailing at the 2016 Rio Games. SVG caught up with Sefton as the racing action was just about to begin last weekend in Barcelona.
What has been your impression of the technical leaps in the production this year?
This America’s Cup, we’ve tried to take things forward as it’s our responsibility as host broadcaster to challenge ourselves as to how to make sailing, as a TV spectacle, more engaging and more understandable. Sailing is a really complex sport for a lot of people, and we have to do our best to try to make it as easy as possible for viewers to follow. That’s the challenge which, over the last few Cup cycles, the respective production teams have really taken on.
For example, the America’s Cup in San Francisco, delivered a graphics breakthrough bringing augmented-reality graphics to viewers and, for the first time, could create a digital field of play. Suddenly, viewers could see the racecourse and who’s ahead. That was a massive leap forward, not just for sailing but also for TV graphics because, up to that point, people playing with the AR graphics were doing it in stadium sports.
Big leaps forward don’t come every cycle, but at this America’s Cup the big thing has been WindSight IQ, which is making the invisible visible. The genesis of that project was in New Zealand with Brent Russell, our technical director. Brent demonstrated that the technology could work with LiDAR, and, in New Zealand, we did a test and showed that, in theory, we could point a LiDAR out at the course and make a graphical interface that could show the wind. Then we brought in Capgemini for the heavy lifting: they set up three LiDAR stations here that overlap and built the mathematical models to take that data to enable us to create a graphics interface.
We did a test event here in Barcelona and had an interesting moment when we had the concept and brought in the team, all the equipment, and turned on the system. When it came to life and worked, it was a real eureka moment. A lot of us are lifelong sailors so to suddenly see the wind, where the high-pressure areas are, the low-pressure areas are was a massive breakthrough. Bringing that to air was taking our technologies and stacking them on each other.
Director of production Leon Sefton (right) with live director Chris Carpenter
“We handpick the best vendors, we handpick the best freelancers, and we’ve got a strong niche group who specialise in sailing”
How so?
It starts with a helicopter and the Shotover camera system, which is a high-quality stabilized broadcast camera shooting the action from the sky. On top of that video, there is optical tracking from Bolt6, whose system has learned the shape of the racecourse, the shape of the race markers, the yachts, our TV-camera boats, the skyline and Barcelona. Bolt6 looks at that and can create an AR field of play. On top of that, we add WindSightIQ and a sailing simulator that can look into the future and lay out what the yachts might do based on the known parameters and performance of the yachts and what the wind is doing. In a way, [fans] sitting at home know even a little bit more than what the sailors know as far as how things will play out. But that was the goal: give people information and engage them. The more information people have the more entertaining it is.
How do you think the use of LiDAR could expand?
Right now, playing with LiDAR, we’re working in the two-dimensional. The ultimate goal would be to have multiple LiDARs taking additional slices of the windfield; with a mathematical model, you could turn that into a three-dimensional view of the wind with even more detail — not just speed and direction but also sheer. But, at the moment, we’re working in a two-dimensional plane, which has been remarkable because, in the past, the way of collecting wind data was to have physical wind buoys out on the racecourse. To accomplish what we’ve done with LiDAR, you’d have to have tens of thousands of buoys out there. This is a really elegant technical solution to a very, very complex problem.
Another big advance is the use of a hydrogen-powered camera chase boat. How has that improved the production?
The drive to bring hydrogen foiling chase boats into the event is a nice next step to honestly say we’re using clean energy. That’s a big deal, but also the speed that the racing now plays out at is so fast in order to keep up with the action, we have to foil as well. So it’s not just hydrogen [to be clean], but it’s the ability to stand up and foil that has been a massive game-changer for us. Previously, we used displacement catamaran hulls, but, here in Barcelona, because of the proximity to the shoreline, you can get quite aggressive waves. While the AC75 race yachts can cope with that and can stand up and fly above it, it’s a big problem to chase them in a camera boat. First, it’s very hard on the people and the equipment, but it’s also quite dangerous. And having the hydrogen foiling chase boat allows us to keep up with the yachts as they are sometimes doing over a hundred kilometers per hour.
The other thing is not leaving wake or disturbing the race, and that means we can be a lot more dynamic with what we’re trying to achieve with our coverage. We must be very careful not to interfere with the race yacht and the race itself, and there are times when we can kind of get in there and mix it up and put the chase boat into positions where we can be more aggressive. That means putting the lens into a place that is more dynamic than we previously could.
You also have an amazing amount of transparency with respect to what is happening on the boats and between the crew members. You can hear everything they are saying, there are 12 cameras on the boats, and a lot of the small POVs. What does that mean in terms of the storytelling?
Sailing has a unique aspect, which many sports are probably quite jealous of: we can mic the athletes and, because of that, have an immersive viewing experience. We’re able to hear the crew decisions as they’re playing out, and that is important for viewers who want to understand what is happening.
That has also colored how we approach commentary where we lay back than talking over everything. We work with the commentary team to let the story tell itself as much as possible and then look to interpret and acknowledge what’s being said on board. We would be crazy to do anything else as we’ve got this immense technical production tool that other sports just don’t, and won’t, ever have. We can push and pull the audio signals, hear every word that’s being said, and we can get sailors talking to each other at the end of a race as well, which is amazing. Audio is a massive, massive part of what equals success for us.
This is obviously a big international effort with a crew comprising a lot of people from all around the world. How has the team done getting to this point?
Yeah, we’ve got a big team, probably about 130 people, and we’re not dissimilar to an America’s Cup team. The team needs a wide range of skill sets and expertise to put on the show: everything from engineers handling the boat technologies to RF, all the comms systems, the race-management system, technology for the camera operators, EVS operators, etc. We handpick the best vendors, we handpick the best freelancers, and we’ve got a strong niche group who specialize in sailing. That’s important as we always look to take the game forward, and we can’t do that if we are re-recruiting. An America’s Cup is a bit of a startup operation, so we need to get the band back together, dust the instruments off, and wake the beast up. But this group does an amazing job for the event as the America’s Cup brand has really, really high standards everywhere you look.
It has been a full and quite challenging schedule sometimes, probably the most racing I’ve ever seen are in an America’s Cup, but we’re all super relieved to get to the stage of the regatta where the light is at the end of the tunnel. But it has been a real privilege to do it, and the teams worked super, super hard to bring a high-quality 4K HDR production. That’s a high standard for a host broadcast, and not many host broadcasts in other sports are doing this yet.
Read more Live from the America’s Cup: The Holy Grail of ‘seeing the wind’